Celebutards

by Andrea Peyser

  She already does.

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  I wonder if, in this age of Oprahtainment, we need to elect leaders at all. All we need is to allow Oprah Winfrey to step up and tell us what to think, to feel, to buy and to say.

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  15

  All the News That’s Sh*t to Print

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  I found that the past year’s articles generally reported both sides, and that most flaws flowed from journalistic lapses rather than ideological bias.

  —Public Editor Byron Calame on his paper’s continued championing of the Duke University rape hoax, April 22, 2007

  THE NEW YORK TIMES IS a lot more than fish wrap. It is a vaunted institution whose editorials on a daily basis are capable of influencing government and corporate policy, both in the United States and abroad, whose trend stories can move millions of dollars in merchandise, whose news columns are apt to change the current of public discourse, and whose whims and fancies scattered throughout the paper may create and end careers. Or so it claims.

  As the self-described newspaper of record, (established 1851) The Times proclaims that it publishes “All the news that’s fit to print.” That is an awesome promise to its readers, and one not to be taken lightly. And so it is to make one scream how often this newspaper has abused and distorted its sacred pages to advance grudges, push political and social agendas, move government policy to the far left, and blithely obscure any version of truth except that practiced in the People’s Republic of West 41st Street in its steady march to win the Pulitzer prize, of which The Times has taken home a record number.

  Examples are legion. The paper has waged tireless campaigns over the years that defy logic and countermand journalistic credibility. The Times fought to keep alive the charges against three innocent, white Duke University lacrosse players unfairly accused of raping a black woman, and hinted incredibly about an extramarital affair by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who was guilty of nothing more than being a Republican.

  It was stubborn in its support for the admittance of women to the Augusta National Golf Club, a non-story about which there was virtually no public outcry. During the Nazi regime The Times refused to acknowledge mass slaughter, ignoring all evidence of systematic murder until it was far too late to save Jewish lives. These random examples paint a long-term pattern that leads one to believe that the warping of information is no accident. Rather, it is a virulent disease.

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  During the Nazi regime The Times refused to acknowledge mass slaughter, ignoring all evidence of systematic murder until it was far too late to save Jewish lives.

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  Due to the paper’s many gaffes and missteps, coupled with its transparent left-leaning ideology disguised as objectivity, many have come to question the Times’ stranglehold on journalistic authority. Still, it is alarming how frequently the paper continues to be cited in other media, or worse, its spins and assertions are parroted, unattributed, in places as disparate as television, newspapers and the Internet. This worldview may benefit the social élan of the paper’s editors and reporters, but it does precious little for the truth.

  Two examples from the past illustrate this point. The first is the story of a renegade reporter who traded the truth for a Pulitzer and a place of honor at a tyrant’s table. The second is of a publisher so ashamed of his faith, he would let his own brethren die so as not to rock the boat.

  Few examples illustrate the Times’ stubborn argument with stark reality as clearly as the case of Walter Duranty, the Soviet Union correspondent in the 1930s. Duranty was both an apologist for Josef Stalin and a bit of a tyrant, appointing himself America’s cheerleader for a regime whose farm collectivization policies were responsible for the famine that ripped through Ukraine, piling uncounted millions of bodies into town squares. Duranty, a one-legged reporter—he’d lost a limb in a car crash—claimed, among other things, that brutal Siberian labor camps gave people a chance to rejoin Soviet society and, for those who couldn’t fit in, “the final fate of such enemies is death.”

  Reports of a Ukranian famine began appearing in other newspapers in 1932, but Duranty was in public denial. Without television or Internet pictures to give lie to his reporting, he was considered by many the final authority. For his bloodthirsty work, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.

  But in a private conversation with a British diplomat in 1933, Duranty admitted, “it is quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.” Still, Duranty continued to lie about the non-existence of mass starvation as he curried favor with the Soviets. Much later, several organizations demanded that the Pulitzer board revoke Duranty’s prize, but in 2003, the organization officially declined. This prize will always have an asterisk attached. How many more?

  Just a few years later, the paper’s publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was considered primarily responsible for the paper’s downplaying of reports from Europe that Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich was targeting Jews for expulsion—and genocide. Sulzberger, a Jew, feared taking on any Jewish cause. Once again, it will never be clear how many lives may have been saved through a well-placed story, a Page 1 photo, or how American foreign policy may have been influenced for the good, had our Newspaper of Record done its job.

  Fast forward to the present. The Times’ long-term hostility toward the military was undeniable in an extreme act of omission in October 2007. Alone among local dailies, the paper printed not a word of President George W. Bush’s plan to bestow the Medal of Honor to a New Yorker who gave his life to save another in Afghanistan. Fully ten days after the medal was announced, garnering coverage from reporters from the Denver Post and Los Angeles Times, as well as by scribes at all the other New York papers, The Times published a short (for The Times) article about Bush actually awarding the medal. A longer piece appeared a month later, hidden in the weekly section that appears only on Long Island.

  Any lingering doubts about the Times’ hostility toward soldiers were eliminated on January 13, 2008, when the paper published a front-page story, which jumped to three inside pages, based around an alarming trend: Fighting men returning from Iraq and Afghanistan had been charged with 121 murders in the United States! However, bloggers and journalists such as columnist Ralph Peters crunched the numbers, and determined the soldiers’ murder rate was actually fives times lower than that of the general young male population, a fact The Times carelessly—or intentionally?—ignored. Even when you factor in veterans charged but not convicted of deadly crimes, the proportion of potential killers was far lower than that of the non-vet population. Perhaps the paper was irked by progress in Iraq. War casualties had fallen greatly, and with America’s help, the country appeared to be returning to a semblance of normalcy. What was left to complain about?

  The state of Israel is another frequent Times target. In 2007, it published an exhaustive front-page article bemoaning the killing by Israeli soldiers of dozens of Palestinian “children.” Never mind that some of these kids were 19 and armed. The piece never mentioned atrocities carried out against Israel by Palestinians.

  In 1994, I had the privilege of traveling to South Africa to cover the historical election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first black president. It became immediately clear that the story was more complicated than it initially appeared. Far more than The Times insisted.

  The election was presented in this country as the force of light—the African National Congress party, led by Mandela—against the force of evil—the Inkatha Freedom party, populated by the vast, poverty-stricken Zulu nation. It was clear Mandela, a good man whose fans in the United States included Jane Fonda and Oprah Winfrey, would win. However, the Zulus were demonized, presented to Times readers as collaborators with the forces of Apartheid. It was partly true. Some Zulus in fact teamed up with the white man, mainly as a method to foil the ANC, whose leaders, they felt, were leavin
g them to starve. It was politics. It was complicated. It was a story The Times either failed to understand fully, or found preferable to ignore. And it was a theme I would see regurgitated from The Times in papers all over the country, unable to send their own correspondents to cover this news event. It was Times Truth.

  Bill Keller, the Times’ Pulitzer winner (for work in the Soviet Union), and later the paper’s executive editor, was the Johannesburg correspondent. From his desk in Jo-burg, it was easy to make monsters out of the millions of members of the once-proud Zulu nation, many of them barefoot. Then a funny thing happened. Keller visited the Zulu nation. Here, a century before, warriors defeated the better-equipped British army. Now, people begged for scraps.

  His coverage of the election suddenly did a 180-degree turn. He never again denigrated this tribe.

  At home, journalistic gospel is far trickier to adjust, particularly if your paper’s liberal reputation is on the line. The Times waged a long and strenuous battle against the reforming of welfare—the culture of entitlement—that, in 1994, saw 5.1 million American families dependent on public assistance. Because of welfare, generations of children were sentenced to grow up without ever seeing an adult family member go to work.

  The Times predicted dire consequences if President Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, putting a five-year limit on benefits. Poverty! Starvation! Rotten jobs! In every scary article, I noticed, the same six anti-reform activists were interviewed. Not one of its reporters actually went to Harlem, East New York or the Bronx—or simply stepped outside the door in Times Square—to talk to the people actually on welfare. So I tried something radical. I did just that.

  In Harlem, I asked a mother if reforming welfare would be a hardship. Hell yes! she answered—and the best thing that ever happened to her.

  I was in shock. On the street, I talked to various people, men and women, and I could not find a welfare recipient who voiced opposition to reform. They had strong opinions. They knew which of their neighbors was a welfare cheat, they knew how to work the system to their best advantage. They knew how to game it. But everyone I spoke to was excited at the prospect of getting back to work, even in a low-paying job. It sure beat life on the dole.

  From its high of more than 5.1 million families on welfare, today fewer than 2 million receive benefits. What’s more, rates of poverty among African-American children have dropped dramatically. Welfare reform is a smashing success. Do you think The Times ever admitted it was wrong?

  The twenty-month reign of Times’ executive editor and Pulitzer winner (for an essay on his black maid) Howell Raines, which began in September 2001, demonstrates the ease with which the paper can and will run amok.

  Raines’ catchphrase was “flood the zone”—a term that refers to enlisting all available resources—news reporters, columnists, sports writers, even editorial writers—to cover a story he liked. Even a non-story.

  Raines did just that with his paper’s exhaustive coverage of the male-only Augusta National Golf Club in 2002 and 2003, and the skirmish fought against it by one woman, Martha Burk of the National Council of Women’s Organizations. This was a story that made Raines’ pulse race, and he tried desperately to equate the club’s membership policies with the whites-only water fountains of his Southern youth. The subject garnered daily stories, Page 1 think pieces, even articles on the sports pages, editorials and op-ed columns, as The Times put pressure on sponsors to pull their support of the Masters tournament in Augusta. But when two columns were written that defended the golf course, they were killed. The paper’s lock-step coverage of a story that just wasn’t that important was an embarrassment. And it was a precursor to Raines’ biggest debacle: Jayson Blair.

  Critics, including some inside The Times, see Jayson Blair, who is African-American, as a poster boy for the failure of affirmative action. Others say he is a failure of the Times’ star system, which gives breaks to reporters favored by editors. I say he is simply a failure. But the fact that Jayson Blair single-handedly hoodwinked the grand institution for as long as he did, committing sloppy, plagiarized work—or published stuff he simply made up in his feverish head—speaks volumes about what’s wrong with The Times. And despite safeguards taken in his wake, signs persist that Blair could happen again.

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  The fact that Jayson Blair single-handedly hoodwinked the grand institution for as long as he did, committing sloppy, plagiarized work—or published stuff he simply made up in his feverish head—speaks volumes about what’s wrong with The Times.

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  He started as an intern. Although his work was error-ridden from the start, he was hired as a Metro section reporter. His poor work habits and general flouting of authority led his editor, Jonathan Landman, to send a now-infamous memo warning management “to stop Jayson from writing for The New York Times. Right now.” He was promoted to the national desk in 2002 instead, and assigned to a high-profile story: the Beltway sniper attacks—a series of terrifying shootings in the Washington, D.C., area that held the region hostage. There, Blair’s exclusive reporting threatened the case before it even got close to trial.

  Three weeks after the attacks began, two suspects were arrested: John Allen Muhammad, a former Army demolitions expert and expert rifleman, age forty-one, and Lee Boyd Malvo, age seventeen. Blair wrote a series of scoops in which he asserted that Malvo, not Muhammad, was considered by authorities the shooter and the older man the lookout. In one memorable article, Blair actually wrote—and The New York Times printed—that a key piece of evidence was “DNA linked to Mr. Malvo that was found on a grape stem dropped at one of the sites where a bullet was fired.” That this did not strike some editor as ridiculous is testament to an old saying in journalism: Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

  Blair seemed to be itching to get caught, and he did. In Timesian fashion, the paper commemorated his implosion with a massive report by a committee of twenty-five Times staffers and three outside journalists. Published on May 11, 2003, the committee’s account uncovered, among other things, that Blair claimed he traveled to Palestine, West Virginia, to interview Gregory Lynch, the father of Private First Class Jessica Lynch, rescued from captivity by U.S. forces. Lynch “choked up as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures, and declared that he remained optimistic,” Blair wrote. Trouble was, no tobacco fields or cows can be seen from Lynch’s porch. Blair, who wrote this dispatch from the Starbucks near his home in Brooklyn, sought the most clichéd description possible of what he thought West Virginia must look like.

  Blair did not self-destruct without taking others down with him: Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd resigned under pressure. As a result of Blair, the paper created the position of public editor to answer readers’ concerns, a fairly useless invention.

  I wish I could say Blair’s dismissal cleaned up the paper. Far from it. If anything, its campaigns became far more strident and personal.

  The case of the Duke rape fiasco remains the prime illustration for how a stubborn paper will never back down, never apologize. Not even after it sought to ruin the lives of three men who did nothing amiss, except associate with the wrong stripper.

  Her name was Crystal Gail Mangum. On March 13, 2006, Mangum, age twenty-seven, a college student, and another woman, were hired to dance for members of the Duke University lacrosse team at a house in Durham. It was soon clear that Mangum, who was intoxicated and argued with her customers, was not going to do what she was paid for. Stumbling, she repaired to the bathroom. A short while later, she cried rape.

  The story was irresistible, and the Durham district attorney, Mike Nifong, who was up for re-election, blasted the awful details far and wide. Here was the tale of two poor women—one African-American, the other part Asian—students from the wrong side of the tracks, reduced to stripping for privileged white men. When the party got out of hand, the story goes, Mangum was raped.

  But Mangum’s tale of se
xual debauchery and racism started falling apart almost immediately. She told many conflicting stories. Even factoring in confusion, two things could not be ignored: She picked the Duke players out of a photo lineup that included only white lacrosse players. This lineup did not, as United States Department of Justice guidelines insist, include “filler” photos of men who are not considered suspects. In other words, Mangum was given a “multiple-choice test in which there were no wrong answers,” defense attorneys charged.

  In addition, surveillance footage from a nearby bank machine puts one of the suspects far from the house at the time of the alleged attack. No matter. The time of the attack was simply changed by Nifong.

  On April 18, 2006, two lacrosse team members, Collin Finnerty, age twenty, and Reade Seligmann, age twenty, were nonetheless arrested on rape, kidnapping and sexual offense charges. They were joined in May by Duke graduate David Evans, age twenty-three.

  The juicy story was just too good to be true. By late spring, nearly every major newspaper in the country had reported it as a case in trouble. Nifong, though, could not let go. And he found an ally in The New York Times.

  The Times weighed in on August 25, 2006, with a lengthy story based on what it called new evidence. It was a humdinger. And here is the paragraph—the so-called “nut graf”—contained in the 5,700-word Page 1 article. It said everything:

  “By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong’s case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.”